Jesuits Expelled from Spanish and Portuguese Empires
Charles III expelled the Society of Jesus from Spain and all its dominions by a decree signed in secret, executed simultaneously across the empire in the early hours of 2 April 1767. Around 5,000 Jesuits in Spain and some 2,600 in the Americas and the Philippines were arrested in their houses at the same hour, marched to the coast, and shipped to the Papal States. Portugal had expelled them in 1759, on Pombal's order, and France in 1764; Charles followed, and the three then pressed the papacy until Clement XIV suppressed the order entirely in 1773. The stated pretext in Spain was the Esquilache riots of 1766, a bread and taxation revolt in Madrid that the government chose to blame on Jesuit incitement. The real motives were structural. The Society answered to a general in Rome rather than to the crown, held enormous wealth, and controlled a large part of the education of the elite — all of which was incompatible with the Bourbon programme of subordinating the church to the state. The Paraguayan reductions were the sharpest case: some thirty self-governing mission towns of Guaraní converts, insulated from colonial labour demands and slave raiders, which the crown regarded as a state within a state. The colleges were closed or transferred and the properties confiscated. The immediate effect in Spanish America was an educational vacuum that took generations to fill, and a class of expelled creole Jesuits writing in Italian exile — Clavijero on Mexico, Molina on Chile — whose defence of American nature and history fed the patriotism of independence. The order was restored in 1814. The reductions were abandoned and their populations dispersed within a generation.
- Year: 1759 CE
- Category: Cultural
